Seeing the folk of Es City reminded Lydryth vividly-and painfully-of her mother. It was strange to think that she might be distantly related to some of these people. Elys had often told her daughter that her own parents had fled from Estcarp, for reasons they had never discussed.
A guard in mended, serviceable mail barred her way at the gate leading into a central courtyard. “Your business …” He cast a sharp glance at the symbol she wore. “. .. songsmith?”
“I seek audience with one of the witches,” she said, stiffening her spine to meet his flat, uncaring eyes. “A few minutes, no more.”
His gaze traveled over her. “On what matter?”
“A matter of healing,” Lydryth said, after a second’s hesitation, trying to curb her impatience. I’ve come. so far! Blessed Gunnora, lend me strength! “I was told any might consult with a witch on a matter of healing.”
“Your name?”
“Lydryth.”
“Wait here.” The guardsman turned and disappeared into the huge, time-blackened portal, returning in a few minutes. “Tomorrow mom,” he told her. “Before the sun tops the city wall.”
“Many thanks,” she said, resisting the grin of relief that wanted to spread over her face. “I will be here.”
Her singing that night at The Silver Horseshoe consisted mostly of lightsome ballads, tales of wonder, good magic and love. It was hard to tone herself down when a dour old fanner requested the lugubrious “Soldier’s Lament.” She sang, and when her voice tired, she played her flute. By the time the Horseshoe’s patrons had departed for their beds, the young minstrel had earned enough to replenish the coins she’d spent during her four days on the road.
Dawn barely silvered the east when she awoke, unable to sleep longer. After breaking her fast with porridge and goat’s milk, Lydryth shouldered her pack, then footed a quick way through the twisting streets toward the Citadel. The sun had only cleared the distant horizon when she sat down to wait, half-concealed in a doorway across from the guard’s post.
Her two hours’ vigil stretched like an overwound harpstring, but finally she arose, brushing her cloak and breeches off, then picked her way across the now-crowded street.
There was a different guardsman on duty, but, after consulting a list, he ordered her to leave her quarterstaff with him, then waved her toward the darkened portal. Lydryth tugged open a massive, leather-bound door, to find herself in a long stone corridor. A young woman faced her, garbed in a shrouding robe of misty silver, with the heavy weight of her nightdark hair coiled into a silver net. Without a word, her dark grey eyes downcast, she motioned to the songsmith to follow her.
Lydryth strode after the girl-for a glance at the rounded face had convinced the minstrel that the witch was several years younger than herself-down the first corridor, then into a second, and then, finally, a third. Each hall was featureless, made of age-darkened stone, and illuminated only by a series of palely lit globes suspended in metal baskets.
When she first saw those globes, Lydryth barely repressed a gasp of surprise. She had seen similar lights before, but only once. They hung from the walls and ceilings of her home, the ancient Citadel ofKar Garudwyn. Knowing something of the age of that stronghold, she looked about her with even greater awe. This place was old.
The young witch stopped before another, smaller door. Opening it, she silently waved Lydryth through, then followed her.
A woman sat at a desk in the scroll-lined study beyond, a woman whose hawklike features (in the way of the Old Race) betrayed little age, but whose eyes made the younger woman flinch as she faced that unswerving gaze. The woman went gowned the same as Lydryth’s guide, but with the addition of a cloudy, moon-colored jewel hanging from a chain about her neck.
The witch pushed back her chair a little and sat for a long moment in silent study. Her voice, when she finally spoke, bore a country accent, but her air of command argued that any peasant upbringing had long been put behind her. She did not introduce herself, but that did not surprise the minstrel; to give another one’s true Name was to open a chink in one’s armor of Power. “The songsmith Lydryth,” she commented, finally. “You seek healing. For whom? Yourself? You appear healthy enough to me.”
“No, not for me,” Lydryth said, forcing her eyes to continue meeting the witch’s uncompromising stare. “It is for someone else in my family.”
“And you have come from far away, haven’t you?” The woman rose to her feet, paced deliberately across the flagged floor to front the bard directly. She lacked half a head of Lydryth’s height, but the aura of command surrounding her more than made up for the physical difference. “There is the smell of sea about you, and your boots have seen much walking. Are there no healers in your own province?”
“We have our Wise Women, true enough,” Lydryth admitted. “But none so far have been able to help, for this illness is of the mind and spirit, not the body.”
The witch’s head moved in a tiny shake. “Not good, songsmith. Few indeed are the healers who can treat such. Who is so afflicted, and how did it happen?”
Lydryth took a deep breath as memory seared her. “It happened six years ago, when I was little more than a child. We were on a … quest. . . when we came across a place of the old Power. It was said to be a kind of oracle that could allow one to farsee the object of one’s greatest desire. But when Jervon peered through it, it struck him down. Since then he has been as a small child, one who eats when fed, follows when led around-”
“He?” The witch’s eyes held a faint, angry spark. “Do you mean to tell me a man sought to use a source of the Power? You seek my help for one who meddled in things those of his sex cannot hope to comprehend?”
“For my father, Jervon, yes,” Lydryth stammered, wondering how she’d erred. “I was told you had ways of healing-”
She broke off as the witch’s hand snaked up to grab her chin and turn it from side to side, consideringly. “Your eyes …,” the woman muttered to herself, “blue … and the jaw is wider … but still, the color of hair, the chin-” She glared up at the younger woman. “You are a child of the Old Race-in part. Yet your mother surely betrayed her calling by choosing to marry, when we needed every bit of Power we could summon! Do you think I would help a man who lay with one of my sisters, thus depriving her of her witchhood?”
But she didn’t lose her Power! She wasn’t even born in Estcarp! Lydryth silently protested. The undisguised hatred in the witch’s eyes unnerved her; she knew that the women of Power deemed union with the males of their race as but a poor second to the holding of that Power, but nothing had prepared her for this irrational anger and hatred.
The woman’s strong, short fingers tightened on the songsmith’s chin. “And what about you?” she murmured, in a lower voice. “Did you escape the testing given all girl children? Do you hold the Power? If you do, we shall see-” Breaking off with a hiss, she held the cloudy jewel she wore up before the bewildered minstrel’s face. “Touch it!” she commanded.
Will clashed with will as Lydryth tried to step back, away from those pale grey eyes glittering with a light that was not wholly rational. “No!”
“Touch it!”
Compelled, the younger woman blindly reached out a hesitant fingertip, felt it brush the witch’s hand, then the cool slickness of the jewel’s crystal. The witch broke their eye-hold, glancing down, and Lydryth watched the eagerness slowly fade from her expression. “Nothing . . . ,” the woman mur- mured, her eyes fixed once more on the minstrel’s face. “Nothing, the jewel remains dead. But I was so sure. …”
Perversely angered by yet another demonstration of her lack of Power, Lydryth glanced down at the jewel as she pulled her hand away and stared, suddenly arrested. Had she seen a tiny spark flicker deep within the heart of the cloudy gem? You’re imagining it, she thought angrily. Be grateful this time that you have no Power-otherwise, this half-crazed woman might well try to hold you here!
The songsmith stepped back, away from the witch. “So you cannot help me,” she said. “Or will not-which is it. Lady?”
The grey-clad, bowed shoulders shrugged; the woman’s voice was naught but the thinnest thread of sound. “Once, perhaps, before the Turning … I do not know. But now …” The witch shook her head, putting out a hand to grip the carven back of the chair as though she might fall without the support. She made a gesture of dismissal. “Go now, songsmith. . . .”